Peoples' Perception and Response to Floodings: The Bangladesh Experience

Abstract

Bangladesh, a test case of disaster management, has been continuously internalizing lessons learned by the people, the bureaucracy and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), after successfully responding to major natural disasters, particularly floods. The unprecedented flood of 1988 was a great educator to almost all stakeholders in Bangladesh. Since then, it has improved its capacity to cope with disasters despite some failures in its management of the macro‐economy and governance. Credit goes mostly to the ordinary people whose resilience and creativity during and after disasters have been quite heroic. This paper makes an attempt at documenting peoples’perception and response to major floods at different stages of the crisis. An illustrative plan for coping with flood disasters encompassing these stages has also been designed and outlined in this paper.